Pirates 7, Astros 3: Patience-testing pace brings only more losing

As the Astros tighten their grip on last-of-the-last status, beginning to pull away from the pack for the worst record in baseball, they took “testing the fans’ patience” to a new level Wednesday night.

They took it literally, asking for 3 hours and 47 minutes of patience and leaving the crowd unrewarded.

The Astros and Pirates crawled through much of their nine innings, taking pitches, changing relievers and downshifting this normally leisurely game to its lowest gear. All that time got the locals was another loss, this time a 7-3 defeat at the hands of the Pirates.

Astros pitchers combined to throw 192 pitches, two short of their season high. Meanwhile, the Astros saw a season-high 189 pitches themselves, getting chance after chance but leaving 14 men on base.

“I looked up and saw it was (only) the fifth inning,” Brett Wallace said. “It felt a little long, but I think if we had pulled out a victory, we wouldn’t have felt it that much.”

After the starting pitchers’ bullets were emptied out five innings in, the Astros held a 3-2 lead. But leaving so much of the game up to middle relief was too much to handle, and it proved so quickly.

No relief here

The Pirates scored three runs off Enerio Del Rosario in the sixth, with an assist to a Wallace error, and never trailed again.

After Del Rosario (0-1) got the first out, pinch hitter Xavier Paul doubled and scored the tying run on back-to-back singles by Jose Tabata and pinch hitter Garrett Jones. The go-ahead run crossed the plate one batter later when Andrew McCutchen grounded one to first. Instead of conceding the run for the out, Wallace tried to go home and threw wildly.

The final run of the inning — unearned — scored on a Neil Walker sacrifice fly, and Paul poked one into the Crawford Boxes for a two-run homer in the seventh.

“Coming out after five leaves a lot of room left, and that’s why the goal is to go deep into games,” said Astros starter J.A. Happ, who was forced out with a pitch count of 108.

The crawl began early in Happ’s outing in which he walked four and struck out seven, bringing his pitch count sky-high. He has exceeded six innings in just three of his 14 starts and none of his last eight.

But the Astros had their chances early to get Happ an even bigger lead than the one with which he left.

Trailing 1-0, the Astros loaded the bases in the first inning with two outs, but Chris Johnson grounded into a fielder’s choice. Two innings later, they had plated a run to trail 2-1 and loaded the bases again only to have Clint Barmes ground into another fielder’s choice.

The Astros had a few chances as the at-bats got quicker later in the game. They left two on after yet another fielder’s choice in the eighth — this one by Hunter Pence — and stranded another pair in the ninth as Barmes hit into a fielder’s choice for the second out and J.R. Towles struck out to break the pattern.

By that time, few of the 29,866 remained, and fewer seemed into the action as the Astros’ longest nine-inning home game since 2002 and the suddenly lopsided score took their toll.

Silver linings

There were things that went right. Michael Bourn had three hits and two stolen bases on a night when he almost didn’t play with a stomach illness. And Wallace added two hits and two walks around his error as the Astros made Charlie Morton (7-3) look human after a dominant performance in Pittsburgh.